


Bitten Cigarettes and Wonderwall by Oasis

by dannyboii



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Acxa's coo-coo bananas, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Asexual Keith (Voltron), Autistic Keith (Voltron), Bisexual Lance (Voltron), Blood, Child Neglect, Childhood Memories, Community Center, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Family Drama, Family Tragedy, Gardening, I mean- I quit my job and have 25 days before classes start so-, I'll update the tags as I go, If I can update this as often as i hope to, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, It's cigarettes- Keith's a smoker, Keith (Voltron) Has ADHD, Keith (Voltron) Has Abandonment Issues, Keith (Voltron) is Bad at Feelings, Let's do this lmao, M/M, Mentions of Blood, Mentions of Death, Minor Character Death, Pining Lance (Voltron), Recreational Drug Use, Socially Awkward Keith (Voltron), mentions of drug use, not really - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-06
Updated: 2020-03-06
Packaged: 2021-03-01 01:13:50
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,104
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23036875
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dannyboii/pseuds/dannyboii
Summary: When Keith Kogane turned eighteen, he took up smoking as a form of comfort to preserve his father’s memory, so he could remember what his father smelled like. it permeated Keith’s parents’ closet and bedroom and cars. Cigarettes carry memories of home and the people it used to hold. Like his mother, sister, and brother. But they’re all gone now. Unable to stand staying in this city much longer, his brother and sister ran off to universities in different states, and his mother went off to take care of her parents. Keith has been alone months after he turned nineteen.Keith is twenty-one.
Relationships: Keith/Lance (Voltron)
Comments: 5
Kudos: 20





	Bitten Cigarettes and Wonderwall by Oasis

Keith Kogane is a smoker; a walking nicotine addiction. A cigarette sucker. Rather, he’s more of a filter biter. Whatever you want to call him. He smokes when he’s overwhelmed or when he lacks the ability to bide his time, and he does it when he’s impatient. When he’s antsy. What’s being said here is that Keith smokes often. He knows it’s bad for him, that it’s suffocating him and destroying his lungs, but he can’t help it. The sweet and sour bite of nicotine in the air and the sharp burn in the back of his throat are comforting. They help him calm down and unwind. Nicotine grounds him. It shouldn’t, but it does.

His father smoked cigarettes. He died about ten years ago, in the fire that took down the community center across the street. Keith saw it go down from his bedroom window. Saw the firetrucks pull up on his block and try to preserve the building. Keith had no clue his father was even in the community center. He’d been off duty that day and went on a date with Keith’s mother. They had visited the park for a picnic but the date ended too soon; the cries for help and the lingering visuals of smoke had been too clear to ignore.

The building collapsed on his father and he died. Keith had been eleven.

When Keith Kogane turned eighteen, he took up smoking as a form of comfort to preserve his father’s memory, so he could remember what his father smelled like. it permeated Keith’s parents’ closet and bedroom and cars. Cigarettes carry memories of home and the people it used to hold. Like his mother, sister, and brother. But they’re all gone now. Unable to stand staying in this city much longer, his brother and sister ran off to universities in different states, and his mother went off to take care of her parents. Keith has been alone months after he turned nineteen.

Keith is twenty-one.

He doesn’t remember the last time he talked to any of them. Last Christmas..? Do brief text messages qualify as talking? None of them even send birthday or holiday cards to one another unless they all talk to each other without involving Keith but, knowing his family, they’re most likely happier without a family tied with blood to burden them. Unlike Keith, who is lonely without the comfort and weight of a family resting on his shoulders. He tries to not let it get to him, but sometimes he’ll wake up in the morning and it’s so hard to be alone. Other times he’ll pick up his phone and punch in his mother’s newest number, but he hesitates for too long and never actually calls her.

Keith’s family all left as soon as Keith and his sister turned eighteen. They’re twins, he and Acxa. She went to Delaware to attend school. Months later, his older brother Takashi ran away to Arizona with his two boyfriends because all three of them planned to go to nearby colleges and live together. After his nineteenth birthday, his mother left for Washington on the West Coast to take care of her parents. Keith stayed in Oregon. Nobody invited him to come with them. None of them asked if he wanted to stay with them. They all just ran away, abandoning the bigger pieces of furniture, like their mattresses and dressers and desks. Some of his sister’s posters are still up, and Takashi left behind most of his books. His mom took some clothing and a pillow, and that was it.

Keith always considers mailing his family their belongings, but he figured that if they wanted them, then they would have come back for them. They haven’t yet, so it worries Keith that if he throws their things away, they’ll show up the next day asking for their stuff. Even though he has seen none of them in over two years, he would still appreciate it if one of them came home, even for a short period. Their rooms have long gone musty and neglected, dust collecting on everything in the room and clinging to it like a haven. Keith doesn’t go inside them, but he wonders if he should clean them up a bit. He thought for a second about finding bits of nostalgia in the chore.

As his throat tingles from the final puff of his cigarette, he sees the chore through. Crushing the cigarette butt into the wood of the porch’s railing, Keith turns away from it and heads inside. He isn’t sure whose room he should start with, but he figures if he opens up all the bedroom doors and unlocks and opens their windows, it should allow for some airflow and remove the stale air that’s been in the house for the last two years.

Keith headed upstairs. He goes to the closest room, which is Takashi’s. As he opens the door, the air hits him with the heavy scent of mothballs and aged fabric, as if he had just walked into a nursing home. Even though it smells different, and everything is gray with dust, it all looks the same. The overflowing bookcase filled to the brim with old classics and newer publications, and the clear gaps with missing books, big enough for one or two novels on each of the five rows. Takashi’s shelves bowed under the weight, the comforter tossed aside as if Takashi woke up in a hurry on his last day here, which he did.

His walls are bare, Takashi never being one for posters or wall decor, save for the glow-in-the-dark stars stuck to the ceiling. On his side table is a picture of Adam and Curtis, Takashi’s boyfriends. He had opened the drawers to the side table. Keith finds them empty save for an old ticket stub to the movie theater and a note. Keith opens the note, but all it is is a grocery list. One item is cereal. Besides the unmade bedding and the thick layer of dust clinging to his possessions, Takashi’s room is near-spotless. He takes off the bedding and tosses it all down the stairs, a reminder to do laundry. Before he exits, Keith opens up the window. Next is Acxa’s room.

Her bedroom is messier than Takashi’s but cleaner than Keith’s. Acxa had hung up posters on the wall with a variety of thumbtacks and sticky tack, some time ago. There’s a weird-looking anime poster for an old show called Voltron, that has giant metal cats and tall people in spandex suits, a couple for movie stars and popular singers that Keith can’t name off the top of his head, and one last one for a cartoon Keith isn’t familiar with either. Her vanity is messy and full of expired makeup, but her bed’s made. She had scattered her clothes on her floor the day she left, trying to pick what she wanted to keep and what she saw as someone else’s responsibility. The top drawer to her dresser is open and empty. The other drawers are overflowing. Keith pulls back her blackout curtains and opens her window before leaving her room. Her purple bedding ends up being tossed down the stairs.

Down the hallway, with the door facing the length of the hallway, is the master bedroom. Keith doesn’t go inside. Instead, he heads downstairs to begin the laundry, bundling up the bedding in his arms and walking into the laundry room, throwing everything back onto the floor once he’s in front of the washing machine. He tries to pour the proper amount of laundry detergent into the cup, but it ends up overflowing onto his hand. Keith picks up his sister’s comforter, wipes his hand on it, and tosses it into the washer with her sheets. Keith remembers his mother always telling him not to wash sheets at the same time as the comforter, but his mother isn’t here, so this house is a lawless land.

As he stepped over his brother’s bedding, Keith makes his way back up the stairs. He’s started on Takashi’s room since his room is the cleanest. Keith doesn’t own any cleaning supplies besides dish soap and multi-surface wipes, so he grabs one of Takashi’s shirts from his closet to act as a duster. Keith, why don’t you own any cleaning supplies, you hellion? You ask. Well, because cleaning supplies always smell of strong chemicals, and they make his head hurt and his stomach churn. If it makes you feel better, he owns a broom and sweeps the floors every Sunday. As Keith is dusting off Takashi’s belongings, he wonders if this shirt is Takashi’s or not. He hasn’t seen it before so-

“Oh,” Keith realizes, getting a good look at the shirt in his hand. “This is not Takashi’s.” It’s Adam’s or Curtis’. Keith hummed, trying to recall whose shirt it was. He continued to dust with it, though. He didn’t want to bother dirtying another shirt, even though all these shirts are dirty and aged. “Adam’s?” Keith didn’t have a clue. It doesn’t matter. He swiped the shirt across all of Takashi’s books, their covers becoming saturated with their usual color. Pretty.

\---

After wiping down Takashi’s room, Keith moves on to Acxa’s. He picks up her scattered clothing, tossing all of it down the stairs for laundry. Keith uses Adam/Curtis’s shirt to wipe off her posters and vanity mirror. He grabs the garbage can next to her bed, nothing in it besides crumpled up notebook paper and dumps all of her expired makeup into it. He hears something made of glass shatter. Oops. A waft of its expired scent comes up from the garbage can. It must have been a foundation. Gross. As he goes through the vanity to look for more expired makeup, he sees a cheap wide-ruled eighty-page notebook. It has a thin red cardboard cover.

Keith wonders if he should read it or not. He shouldn’t, but Keith has always been a curious person, so he goes against his better judgment and opens it up. It’s empty, save for the leftover marks of the previous page giving proof of his sister’s heavy-handedness. He can’t make out any words from the indented paper, so he doesn’t try to ‘decipher’ it, or whatever you would call being nosy in this kind of situation. The notebook paper in the trash must have come from this notebook, which is missing several pages.

Keith didn’t get along with his sister well enough to know the important things about her. He didn’t know her favorite color, but that isn’t the point. He never knew Acxa to be someone to keep a journal. If he and his sister got along well enough, he could have had the chance to know about her journal or any boy problems, or girl problems, she could have had. Did his sister even like people in the kind of way that leads to boy problems, or girl problems or relationship problems?

Keith has never been the kind of person for relationships, romantic or otherwise. He assumed the whole process of courting people difficult, but people don’t even court one another anymore, right? Who knows? Not Keith. If they do, then nobody has ever courted Keith.

Keith looked at his sister’s room and became bored with cleaning and attempting to organize a room that isn’t his. He doesn’t know how his sister prefers her room. He knows how his brother likes his room. Something about alphabetization. Which is confusing, because how do you alphabetize bedding? It doesn’t matter. Keith gives up. He wants to go for a walk, and he wishes his dog, Kosmo, was still here because Kosmo makes everything fun, but when Takashi ran away to Arizona, he took Kosmo with him. He said it was about Keith being unable to care for a dog, yet, which is untrue. He and Kosmo went for walks all the time and Keith always bought Kosmo the best dog food. Takashi thought Keith couldn’t take care of Kosmo, because Keith can’t clean his room, which isn’t even sound logic. Takashi doesn’t even send updates of Kosmo.

Keith remembers the last in-person conversation he had with Takashi. It happened a little over two years ago. Takashi just finished loading up the two boxes from his room and was trying to coerce Kosmo into getting into Curtis’s SUV. Kosmo didn’t like car rides, and Keith told him. Takashi wasn’t listening to him, like always.

“Takashi, stop, Kosmo doesn’t like car rides!” Keith insisted. “You need to stop! You can’t just take my dog and stuff him in a car until you get to Arizona! That’s not fair to him or me- he’s my dog, not yours!”

Takashi has a habit of dismissing emotional situations and belittling other’s emotions- how he snagged two boyfriends that loved him and his behavior, was beyond Keith. Takashi had stopped struggling with Kosmo for a moment to look at Keith.

“You shouldn’t complain so much about what is and isn’t fair, Keith, it’s unbecoming as a man and an adult. You should know better.” He had said, his black eyes cold and mean. With one final, insisting demand, Takashi got Kosmo into the car. “And besides, you can’t take care of Kosmo, he’s sick all the time because of your negligence.”

“You know better than to take my dog! He isn’t yours and never has been!” Keith defended. “And besides, the only reason he keeps getting sick is that you keep feeding him food he’s not supposed to have! You can’t poison my dog and then blame me!”

“I do not understand what you’re talking about Keith. You must have an unreliable memory if you can’t even remember feeding your dog junk food and garbage.” Takashi said. “Why would I hurt Kosmo?”

“So you could take him from me!” Keith sobbed, his throat had been tight and burning. “You think you’re a good person, but you’re not! You’re not!”

Keith remembers watching the SUV pull out of the driveway, and standing there for hours, hoping Takashi would come back to drop off Kosmo and call it all an elaborate joke. Keith wouldn’t have laughed if it was all a joke, but at least he wouldn’t be missing his dog and his brother, even if he knows that he shouldn’t. He’s better off in Arizona, anyway, because that makes him far away from Keith and Keith prefers it that way.

Keith is dramatic, regarding personal experiences, but that was one of the worst days of his life. It’s tied with the day he watched his father die. Which was terrible and traumatic on everyone in his family, not just him, all right? If that fire had never happened, Keith would have grown up in a healthy and loving home, not a cold and empty house.

The difference between a house and a home is the people and things they hold. A home holds people you love, and belongings you cherish. A house is cold and doesn’t smell like anything. The air is musty, and the furniture is dusty. It’s unforgiving, a house is. A home will always forgive you. Keith lives in a house that used to be home to him until the day his father died. How ironic is it for a fire to turn people cold.

Keith headed down the stairs and towards the front door of the house. Towards the entryway and by the small brown rug that catches any dirt Keith drags in, is one pair of shoes. They’re red, black, and white, with shoelaces that used to be white but have long since turned a shade of gray from age and dirt. His shoes are old and struggle to keep themselves together, but for some odd reason, he can never seem to find the time to buy new shoes. 

Keith sits down on the floor and grabs his shoes to slip them on. He has terrible balance and coordination, to avoid falling and hurting himself, he always sits down to put on his shoes. He never could learn how to tie shoes the “proper” way, so he ties them doing the bunny ears trick that he learned in fourth grade. It’s childish, for a twenty-one-year-old man to do it, but it’s the only way he knows how.

Keith finishes tying his shoes, stands up, and leaves the house. Outside wasn’t that hot. It was around three in the afternoon and the sun was out, the sky clear of clouds and a bright pale blue color. It was boring, the sky was. Keith prefers it when it’s muggy out and you can see the dark gray clouds crawl over the horizon and hover right over the city before it pours, minutes later. Sometimes the rain is cold and refreshing, sometimes it’s a comforting hot.

As he makes it down the sidewalk, passing the lot that used to hold the community center but is now long since abandoned, he hears the giggling of his kid neighbors. He stops and turns around and there they are; his two bratty little neighbors, Nadia and Sylvio. They were brother and sister and sometimes they could be complete menaces- other times, they were too cute to handle. If there was ever an in-between. They looked like they could be twins, but if Keith’s memory served him right, Sylvio was a year older than his sister.

“Are you trying to sneak up on me!?” Keith asks, a large smile plastered on his face. “Is that what you were doing?”

“Yes!” They both laugh.

“We thought we could sneak up on you this time!” Sylvio explains. “It’s more fun that way!”

“What’s more fun?” Keith asks as if he doesn’t see Nadia trying to hide her mother’s acoustic guitar behind her back even though it’s taller than her.

“Asking you to play!” Nadia says and struggles to pull the guitar out from behind her. It scrapes against the sidewalk for just a second before Keith takes it from her.

“Play what?” Keith teases, already tuning the guitar.

“The song!” Sylvio says. “Wonderwall! Play Wonderwall!”

“Wonderwall?” Keith says the name as if he’s never heard of it. “Now I’m not sure I can even play that song… Hmm…”

“Keith!” They both whined. “You play it all the time!”

“Do I!?” Keith gasped. “Really?”

“Yes!”

Keith laughed. “All right, all right, since you asked me so kindly, and brought me a guitar, I’ll play it for you.”

They both cheered.

See, Keith has this deal going on with the kids in his neighborhood and around town. He told them, a year ago, that anytime any of them bring him a guitar, he would play the song Wonderwall by Oasis for those who will listen. Turns out- they are actual children and none of them knew the song Wonderwall by Oasis so the minute Keith made the promise to sing them this “cool new song”, they lost their impish minds and ran as fast as they could to their houses to see if anyone of their family members had a guitar. Three families in his neighborhood had a guitar, Nadia and Sylvio’s was one of them.

Keith finishes up lightly tuning the guitar and strums out a few chords to test it out. Seemed fine.

Keith winked at Nadia and Sylvio before saying, “Anyway, here’s Wonderwall.”

He then began to play the opening chords to Wonderwall, before opening his mouth and singing.

“Today is gonna be the day  
That they’re gonna throw it back to you-  
By now, you should’ve somehow,  
Realized what you gotta do-

I don’t believe that anybody  
Feels the way I do,  
About you now…

Backbeat the word was on the street,  
That the fire in your heart is out-  
I’m sure you’ve heard it all before,  
But you never really had a doubt.

I don’t believe that anybody feels the way I do  
About you now…”

Nadia and Sylvio were doing their best to sing along to the parts they knew and mumble along to the parts they didn’t. It was annoying but still very cute; even if they were off-key and laughing. Keith couldn’t help but smile down at them. When he finished the song, he gently handed it back to Nadia, who awkwardly held it pressed to her entire torso, vertical to her body. She tried her best to clap, but when she realized she couldn’t reach her other hand, she just started slapping the guitar’s body.

thump! thump! thump! thump! thump! thump!

Keith started bowing. “Thank you! Thank you!”

“Nadia! Sylvio! ¿Dónde estás?” Came a mature feminine voice. It was Nadia and Sylvio’s mother. Keith didn’t know her name, he couldn’t remember, but she was nice and liked Keith enough to let her kids be around him. Nadia and Sylvio exchanged a look with each other, then they looked up at Keith.

“We gotta go,” They said together. Then they took off, Sylvio in the lead, and Nadia falling behind from the weight and awkward shape of the guitar. She was trying her best, but all she could do was waddle down the pavement. When Sylvio reached their home before Nadia, he waited for her to catch up before going inside. Keith couldn’t help but laugh to himself. After watching Nadio and Sylvio enter their home, Keith made his way back down the sidewalk.

As he walks down the sidewalk, he looks at the abandoned lot across the way. Where the community center used to stand, crooked yet proud, is nothing but dried up dirt. Outside that space, the grass and plants native to this area are flourishing. The bright purple Lupine flowers that don’t grow anywhere else in town, are tall and healthy. The ankle-high grass is a dark and vibrant green, the texture soft. 

Hidden in the right corner, close enough to the chain-link fence to warp and bend the bottom, is a giant weeping willow tree. Its trunk was a deep and rich brown, looking black it’s so dark, while its leaves were a pale, almost sickly, color of green. The weird thing about the Lupine growing in that lot is that it didn’t start growing there until after the community center burned down. At least, not that Keith can remember. 

He didn’t go to the community center often, as a child. He never understood the point in going somewhere that assisted old people and small children even though, before it burned down, Keith himself was a small child. It was weird, being Keith, he thinks. He was the same age as over half the kids that went to that community center, but he always felt awkward and out of place; as if he was much older than he let on. Like he was an adult in secret or something. As he got older, that feeling stuck, but in a weird and different way. Like, now, instead of being an adult in secret, he was practically a child in secret. Not like in a strange way, where he genuinely believed himself to be a child- but in the kind of way that makes him feel younger than he actually is. As if he never grew up like everyone else.

Or maybe he grew up so fast that he never found interest in the popular things everyone else liked and never experienced the things everyone else experienced. Like parties, or getting drunk or high, or a relationship. People called Keith sheltered, but Keith thinks if his mother had sheltered him, he wouldn’t know what anything was. He knew what a lot of things were, he just never wanted to do any of them. Sort of. Keith wanted to try new things like his peers, but it worried him that if he tried alcohol or got high, any doctor that took his blood would know.

It was weird. Keith was weird.

Looking down at the sidewalk, Keith noticed the start of dandelions growing through the cracks in the pavement, their tiny pokey-looking-but-not-feeling leaves, making themselves known with their bright green color. He liked it when plants broke through the pavement or concrete. It showed that nothing is permanent and that there will always be flowers. Like the Lupines scattered throughout the lot. Those only showed up after something built to be permanent fell apart and left room for a different permanent. The permanent that smelled nice and brought along bees and butterflies.

There used to be flowers in the backyard of Keith’s house too, but two weeks after his father died, his mourning mother took a weed-whacker to their bright pink buds and dug out their roots with her hands and a trowel that had cost two dollars. If his memory was correct, his father had planted those just a couple years prior. They were pink carnations. She cried and screamed the entire time she was out in the yard, digging up the roots. She dug and dug and dug until she scraped her fingertips raw, her voice sounded tight, and the flowers were dead and scattered in the yard.

When she had finished and collapsed in the yard, Takashi had come outside and whispered something to her. She lifted her head and nodded, standing up with Takashi’s support. They had made their way inside the house, their mother stumbling from exhausting the entire time. Then, out of nowhere, Acxa had come outside with a garbage bag and started filling it up with the destroyed carnations, her face stoic, and her earbuds blasting music. After Acxa filled the bag with the flowers, she got down on her hands and knees and began refilling the small ditch in the ground.

Somewhere, in the back of Keith’s head, he remembers the sound of the shower upstairs running, meaning his mother would have been taking a shower and Takashi had been setting out clothes for her. She had gone to bed after that incident, even if it was only five in the afternoon. Keith didn’t remember seeing her for the rest of that day. He just remembers looking through the window to the backyard, watching as his sister worked to salvage what she could of their yard.

After that, for years until she moved away, Acxa took up the responsibility to keep the yard alive and green, planting different flowers and tree saplings of all kinds over the years. They were both only eleven but she was much more of an adult than Keith could ever dream to be. When she moved away, nobody had kept up with the yard and it showed. The grass had grown too tall before dying, flowers had died and withered away, and the still-young trees had drunk all the natural moisture in the dirt, leaving behind dead plants and hard dirt that got you nothing but dust no matter how far you dug.

It was depressing, and Keith is so mad at himself for neglecting it for so long. To see it in this state- it would definitely break his sister’s heart. Not that she would show it. She learned how to hide her emotions after that incident in the yard. She stopped wearing her heart on her sleeve; instead, she hides it in a safe so secure, not even she knows the password. Only the backyard knew how she felt. She poured all of her time and effort into making that yard what it was, and Keith had to ruin it the moment they left him alone.

Keith was so lost in his own mind that he didn’t even notice the person he had bumped into until it was too late. It was quite a surprise to Keith how sturdy this person was since the only people that walked around town were the able-bodied elderly and children that were too clumsy to ride bikes or scooters. This person is built like a young adult.

Blinking and refocusing his vision, Keith looked to see it was, in fact, a young adult he had bumped into. A guy, it seems. His dark brown hair looked a touch overgrown, like it was short in the past but was now growing out somewhat, the ends tickling his ears. His skin color was a pale and rich shade of brown. Wait, is that a thing? Is it possible for a color to be pale and rich at the same time? If it isn’t, it was now, because that’s the color of this guy’s skin. His complexion was flawless, save for the freckles that tickle his smooth forehead and his sharp nose. His eyes were a strange and bright shade of blue. Like, whoa, hold on, his eyes were gorgeous.

“Whoa,” Keith said out loud, looking at this stranger in the eye. He was around two inches taller than Keith because Keith looked up to meet his eyes. “Sorry, I wasn’t looking where I was going, that’s my fault.”

The guy gave a small laugh. “Oh, it’s okay dude, I wasn’t paying attention either.” He admitted, giving Keith a small wink. The wink startled Keith. The only person who winks at him is the middle-aged woman who runs the local bakery a mile or so down the road. She has a habit of giving Keith an extra pastry every now and again because he reminds her of her nephew or something, and anytime she gives him an extra one, she liked to wink at him.

Keith understood her wink. Keith didn’t understand this guy’s wink. It threw him off a bit. Like they had some shared secret, but Keith isn’t in it? Like an inside joke meant for only one person. Then it wouldn’t be an inside joke, but a personal joke. Like a personal pizza.

Keith was staring.

He blinked and looked away from the stranger. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to stare at you, that’s not very nice of me.” He apologizes, taking a step back from the stranger and walks away. “Anyway, have a nice day.”

The guy looks confused. “Uh, yeah, you too, I guess. See you later.”

That was weird. Keith has a lot of strange daily interactions, but at least they’re all with people he’s familiar with. Keith has never seen that guy in his entire life. Or maybe he has and Keith just doesn’t recognize him. Making it down the sidewalk and across the street, Keith entered the local convenience store, called “The Market” by the owners. 

The Market was a very interesting convenience store, considering you could buy pet food, pizza that isn’t that great, something cold to eat from their “deli” section, or, if you so desire, you can even rent an obscure movie you’ve never heard of while reading an obscure book you’ve never heard of. It was a whole thing. The air conditioner is on full blast as the air was cold and dry when Keith walked in. It felt nice since Keith was in his red pull-over hoodie and it feels like it’s the mid-70s outside. Keith sucked at guessing temperatures based on how he’s feeling. He always needs to check the weather app on his phone.

“Keith! What’s up, man?” asked the employee. He was a rather tall and muscular Samoan man with wide arms and an even wider body. He looked overweight, but Keith has seen him carry like, three huge boxes at one time while he was restocking his shop, so there was no doubt in his mind that this guy was all muscle. Keith looked down at the nametag pinned to his juniper green apron.

Keith then realized that he wasn’t wearing his glasses., he looked up at the employee and put on a smile. “Oh, nothing much, just stopping in to grab something to drink. It’s warm out there!” Keith laughed.

“Well yeah, dude, it’s like eighty degrees outside and you’re wearing a sweater! I imagine it feels warm out there!” The employee teased. “I got the air conditioner on full blast but I don’t think it’s doing much, because I’m still sweating up a storm!”

Oh, Keith was way off. Oops.

“Well, I think it feels nice in here if that makes you feel any better,” Keith offered. 

Keith walked to the back of the store, where the refrigerated drinks stayed and grabbed a root beer. He walked back towards the counter and set down the plastic bottle of root beer. Here, he was close enough to read the employee’s name tag. It read ‘Hunk’.

Oh right, Keith thought. He’s the one with the weird name.

Hunk had big brown eyes and a wide nose, with shaggy black hair that’s kept back with an orange bandana. Some shorter pieces of hair have freed themselves from the bandana and framed his face rather nicely. He has a very strong jawline.

“Did you forget my name, again?” Hunk asked, his tone suggested mockery but his small smile showed that he thought Keith’s forgetfulness was a touch funny. “I have a weird name, dude, it’s easy to remember!”

“I’m sorry, man,” Keith admitted, a smile pulling on his mouth. “You would think I would remember, but it always seems to slip my mind, I’m not sure why!”

“It’s all good, don’t worry about it.” Hunk said. “Now give me your money, I need a dollar and seventy cents.”

“Oh right,” said Keith, pulling out two one-dollar bills. “Who’da thunk it?”

“Who’da thunk it indeed, my friend.” Hunk agreed, taking his two dollars and giving him thirty cents in return. “Now get outta here! Go bug someone else!”

“Fine, fine!” Keith said, laughing as he held up his hands in surrender. He pushed on the main entrance with his back, grabbing the right handle and leaning on it as he left. “I’ll see you around town, man, don’t work too hard.”

“Hah hah, all right man, see you around,” Hunk chuckled, giving Keith a small wave.

As soon as the store door closed and Keith was already halfway down the sidewalk, he felt his body relax. Small talk was hard. Social situations were hard. He never seemed to be able to do either of those things, and he’s been like that for as long as he could remember. It was frustrating and things never got easier. He thought it would if he tried harder, but the harder he tried to fit in, the more he lost parts of himself. And the more tired he was.

Look, he doesn’t hate socialization. It can be nice, sometimes, and it’s way better than being cooped up in a house every weeknight, Saturday, and Sunday, but sometimes it was just exhausting. Keith couldn’t find it in himself to even consider the thought of being himself, because being himself was what sent his family away. Being himself was what caused his entire family to fall apart and grow distant with one another after his father’s very sudden and tragic death, and Keith isn’t sure he can ever forgive himself for that, so he tries his best to make sure that everyone sees the best version of Keith possible.

The best version of Keith, the one everyone seems to like and appreciate, is a cool and collected guy who works well with children, and is very helpful towards the elderly men and women in his town. He’s the one who works part-time at the elementary school as the fourth and fifth grader’s music teacher, and he’s the one you can count on. People in the past have asked him to fix their plumbing, repair their patios, change the oil in their cars, to watch their children for a couple of hours, and even help some local farmers maintain their crops or move heavy tools or objects that the older farmers struggle with.

The best version of Keith is exhausting, and he can’t reap in the rewards and consider everything he does for his community, worth it. Keith doesn’t know what he’s searching for in this life, but he hopes he finds it soon because he’s twenty-one years old and miserable. He’s tired of feeling miserable. He just wants to be happy.

Whatever that feels like.

\---

It’s around five in the afternoon, wait- evening? Is it five in the afternoon or five in the evening?

Keith stops walking, his worn-down shoes scrape against the loose gravel of the abandoned local playground. He looks it over, vague memories scratching at the back of his head of better days. The days before everything got flipped around and thrown into the wall. The days before his father died, and the days after. There were flickering bits of information trying to give him happier memories and moments that happened at or near this park, but many happy memories made at this park ended up thrown away by the former and current children of the town.

Keith wasn’t there when it happened, nobody was, but something happened at the park years ago that made every child in town refuse to go near it. The smaller kids, the eight-year-olds and nine-year-olds, said a ghost haunted it because their older siblings insisted it was. Their older siblings, thirteen and fourteen years old, many of them were, swore up and down that years ago, like ten or twenty years ago, some kid fell off the highest point on the jungle gym, broke his neck, and died and now he haunts the playground looking for kids to play with for all eternity and if you see him, you’ll die in three days.

Keith used to tell them that ghosts aren’t real, but stopped once he realized that they weren’t listening and were just goofing around as kids do. Plus, he doubted some kid broke his neck at the park, because Keith and Takashi used to jump from the highest point of the jungle gym all the time to see which of the two of them could do a cooler landing than the other, and the worst injury Keith ever got from being stupid at the park, was a pair of scraped knees.

“Keith!”

Keith looked around him. Had somebody called his name?

“Keith!”

Keith hesitated for a moment. “Hello?” he said, confusion clear in his voice.

“Keith!”

Oh, god it was behind him. He turned around and noticed Nadia and Sylvio had snuck upon him. Well, if you call “lacking spatial awareness” sneaking up on someone. Nadia and Sylvio had a stranger with them, and they were holding onto his hands. He looked familiar.

“Nadia! Sylvio! You scared me!” Keith huffed out a laugh and put a hand to his chest, putting emphasis on his statement. In all fairness, their sudden appearance startled him. He bent down to their eye level, his hands on his knees to keep him balanced. “What are you two doing out? Isn’t it too late for you guys to be running around?”

Sylvio put his hands on his hips. “The sun is still out! It isn’t too late until the sun sets, our mom said so!”

“Did she say that or did someone else say that?” Keith asked, knowing their mother’s rules.

“It was uncle Lance!” Nadia blurted out, a big smile on her face, showing her missing top two front teeth. “He told mama that since the sun was still out, that we could play for longer and mama said yes!”

“Nadia!” Sylvio exclaimed. “I told you not to tell Keith!”

Nadia looked busted. Her already big eyes became wide, showing off her irises that were so brown they looked almost black. “Oops.” She gasped. “I forgot!”

Keith glanced up and the stranger and gestured to him with his head. “Is this your uncle, or are you being kidnapped?” Keith teased, a small smile on his face. “Blink twice if you need help!”

“Keith! We aren’t being kidnapped!” Sylvio griped. Nadia, however, was the better sport of the two and she startled blinking, giggling while doing so. “Nadia!”

Nadia stuck her tongue out at her brother, her face all scrunched up.

“Hey, hey, you two,” their uncle Lance intervened. “You don’t act like this all the time in front of Keith, do you?”

“No!” Sylvio said.

“Yeah!” Nadia laughed. She began jumping up and down and pulling on her uncle Lance’s arm. “Uncle Lance! Can we play tag?”

Lance looked around, his features becoming skeptical as he takes in the dirt roads and the two fields that are nothing but dust and dead grass. He scrunched up his nose before looking at the playground in front of them. “How about we play at the park, huh?” He offered. “I’ve played over there a couple of times when I used to visit your mom and dad more often! It was a bunch of fun!”

“No way!” Nadia insisted, shaking her head. “Kids in my class said that some kid fell and died there like a super long time ago, and that if you play there, you’ll see him and if you do, you have three days until you die!”

Sylvio nodded in agreement. He looked more scared than his younger sister, his brown eyes, paler than his sister’s but just as big, looked bigger than usual.

Lance looked confused. “What? Nadia, nobody died at this park, what are you talking about?”

Keith stood up straight and dusted off his pants, their black color showing off the dirt collected from walking around these past couple hours. “Like, ten years ago, something happened at the jungle gym, some kid fell or something, and ever since then, all the kids in town have boycotted the park. It’s not a big deal. Kids didn’t get hurt at that park but someone did and it has all been downhill since.”

“Oh,” said Lance. “Well, if you don’t want to play at the park, why don’t we play in that lot up the hill? You know the one with the tree and flowers?”

“The kids don’t like that one either,” said Keith. “There used to be a community center there, but it burned down to the ground ten years ago. It’s been empty ever since.”

“Man, a lot happened ten years ago,” Lance chuckled. “You don’t have to worry about that lot being empty for much longer, though, so consider that a blessing.”

That confused Keith. “What do you mean?”

Lance let go of Nadia and Sylvio’s hands to reach into his back pocket. He pulled out a nice and expensive-looking wallet, reached into one of the little card pockets, and pulled out a business card. He handed it to Keith, and Keith looked at it. It was a simple white color and had a rich blue font. Like indigo, almost.

Lance McClain  
McClain Business & Construction  
If you can dream it, we can build it!

Contact Information:  
Phone Number:  
E-mail:  
Fax:  
Located at 5th street and Western!

“My father, so these little brats’ Abuelo, owns a construction company and our main office in the next town over got too full so he’s expanding and is putting an office here over in that lot up the hill. It’s a perfect size, plus, there’s room for a parking lot, and it’s in the nicer part of this town, so people won’t be hesitant to make it down here!”

Keith suddenly felt a bite of irritation crawl up his spine and nestle behind his eyes. “What’s that supposed to mean?” He asked, his jaw clenching. “This town is small, not poor.”

“Well, sure it isn’t,” Lance agreed, tucking his wallet back into his pocket. “It’s just that this town’s appearance isn’t the nicest, but if we put it in the nicer part of town, where the richer folks live, then maybe more people will put their best effort into this area’s looks. You know, when in Rome an’ all.”

Okay, look. Keith tries hard to be polite to people. He smiles, he doesn’t interrupt, and he makes sure he doesn’t appear rude. He also speaks in an articulate way and tries his best to take time to enunciate his words so he doesn’t seem harsh and nonsensical.

However-

“You realize that this is a town fulla’ farmers, right? And that farmers’re gonna have farms fulla dirt an’ vegetables and any other thing you c’n think of, and that things’ll look ‘rustic’ as you so put it because that’s how farming works?” Keith bit out, his tongue sticking to the roof of his mouth as he slurred and jumbled his words. “You think th’t stickin’ an office up there’ll improve this town’s appearance? ‘Cuz it won’t. Nobody here cares about nice off’ces an’ cars, or well-dressed people comin’ through here an’ makin’ money by sitting in chairs and makin’ an’ takin’ phone calls. You come here with that shit, you’ll get laughed right outta town fer bringin’ in dressed up office monkeys who work too little yet make too much.”

Lance just stared, his brow furrowed.

“Keith just swore!” Sylvio and Nadia gasped. They both began pulling on Lance’s shirt which, Keith just realized, was just as nice and expensive, if not worth more than, Lance’s wallet. It was a gray button-up tucked into his pants. Lance had folded their long sleeves up to his elbows. He had a brown belt wrapped through the loop of his pants, and his black pants were those kinds of slacks that had a crease in the middle of the leg. Something Keith found odd though, was that Lance was wearing black sneakers, the dust from the sidewalk and roads collecting on them.

“Are you from the South?” Lance asked. “Nobody else here talks like that.”

“No,” Keith said, slowly, trying to correct his way of speaking. “I’m not from the South. I was born an’ raised in Oregon and I’ve lived in this town for about fifteen years.” Keith had to stop himself from slurring and jumbling his words. Anytime Keith got too emotional and slipped up and talked like that, like a hick on stimulants, it took a great deal of concentration to calm down enough to where he could speak conventionally.

“Then why do you talk like that? It’s rather interesting.” Lance asked, curious.

“Can we go back to the conversation at hand, please?” Keith snapped, rolling his eyes. “You can’t just come here, insult the town I love, an’ put an office building here because you think it would make us all care about what the world thinks of us. I’ve never used this word before, but city-slickers like you are what’s wrong with society. You think all we need are nice buildings an’ clothes in a loose-knit community where, every now and again, you see someone familiar because y’all were waiting in the same line at the grocery store. That’s not how the world should work. You shouldn’t care about what someone wears on their days off, or when they’re out runnin’ errands, or whether their house is nice and big and clean, or if their kids are well-behaved enough that you can stand to be around them. You should care about whether the people you know and are close to, are happy. It’s happiness that matters, not appearances.”

Nadia and Sylvio must have gotten bored with listening to the conversation, because Sylvio reached over to Nadia, touched her arm, and exclaims “You’re it!” before running off, his sister not that far behind. Keith and Lance watch them run off before turning their attention back to one another.

Lance’s eyes were a really bright and lovely shade of blue.

Oh-

“Didn’t I bump into you earlier today?” Keith asked, unsure but pretty sure. “And you like, winked at me or something?”

Lance’s eyes looked up before flickering back to Keith’s face. “Yeah, I believe so.” But Lance looked like he knew so- like he didn’t want to say that he remembered Keith from earlier.

“You know, Keith,” Lance began, sliding his hands into his pockets. He looked hesitant, yet arrogant at the same time. As if he didn’t know what to make of Keith. “I see your point, regarding the office building. It would stand out and look tacky, and I doubt any of our patrons from the next town over would be willing to drive thirty minutes out to the middle of nowhere just for a five-minute-long interaction. It seems pointless.”

“Okay..?” Keith said, unsure of Lance’s point. “And?”

“If you can think of something else to put there, something that benefits your dirt-riddled town, and somehow get me to change my mind, then I’ll tell my father what’ll go there instead. Construction starts in a hundred days, starting tomorrow.” Lance stated, giving Keith an ultimatum. “Nadia! Sylvio! Stop playing in the dirt, let’s go home!”

In the distance, Nadia, and Sylvio looked like blurry little dots, but their whines were clear as day. They both got up from where they were sitting in the field and started running towards Lance, leaving their masterpiece of a pile of dirt, behind. As they ran, Keith looked around him and really took in what this town offered. 

There were two lots of dirt that everyone, including Keith, referred to as fields. They sat across the road from one another, both equal in size. There was a long-abandoned playground, falling apart from rust and lack of use that sat next to one of the dirt-filled lots on the left side of the road. There is a single convenience store and an organic grocery store that never sold name-brand food that sat right next to each other. A laundromat. A bakery that was half a mile down the road from where Keith was standing. There were three schools. There was no bank. No DMV. No restaurants, fast-food places, or independent food joints. Nothing fun. Or important. Or necessary. The closest hospital was a half-hour drive away. Same with the police station. And any kind of fire station.

The kids made it across the dirt lot to where Keith and Lance were standing. They had covered themselves in the pale dust that acted as the ground of the field- correction- the lot. They looked happy and entertained, but Keith knew it was because they didn’t know any other way to entertain themselves besides dirt and Keith singing Wonderwall. The people in this town became so closed-off from one another after the fire, that the only person everyone knew was Keith. There were five-hundred people in this town, and Keith knew all of them, but hardly any of them knew each other. Keith believes that everyone used to know each other very well until the fire burned down the community center, but because that event was so sudden and tragic, nobody knew how to handle it, so they either moved away or just stopped caring about each other.

As Lance walked down the sidewalk with his niece and nephew in tow, Keith’s mouth moved before he realized what he was saying.

“Community center!” He blurted out.

Lance stopped walking and turned around. “Hm?” he hummed, acknowledging Keith. “What did you say?”

“You heard me,” Keith said. “A community center. In that lot across from my house. That’s what this town needs.” Keith’s heart was pounding and the nerves in his head were buzzing as if he had surprised himself with what he had just said. He did. Another community center in this town could either bring everyone together, or it could be the final step off the edge of the cliff, and Keith just needed to know which one it would be.

Lance nodded. “Okay, Keith.” He said, “Well, you have my phone number. Call me tomorrow and I’ll set up an appointment in my office-”

“I don’t have a license or a car of any kind,” Keith interrupted.

Lance gave a huff of frustration. “Then I’ll come back here tomorrow, at around noon. Does that work for you?”

“Well, tomorrow’s Sunday, so yep.” Keith nodded, popping the p in ‘yep,’.

“Goodbye, Keith,” said Lance as he nudged Nadia and Sylvio to walk again.

Keith watched the three of them walk up the slope of the hill as they all became eventual blurs, the distance between them and Keith increasing.

Things were about to get complicated. Keith could sense it. Like, the part in his head Common Sense typically controlled, was buzzing and lingering in the back of his head going; “Uh Oh. Uh Oh. Oh, No. What Now. Ah. Ah. Emergency.”

“I need a cigarette,” Keith said aloud to himself.

\---

One thing about living in Oregon, past the mountains, and towards the high desert, is that the weather has a nasty habit of unpredictability. It’d be sunny and warm one minute, and the next it’s pouring the coldest rain and pea-sized bits of hail. Keith didn’t mind it all that much, you can tell when it’s about to rain when the gray storm clouds hang heavy on the horizon, sluggishly dragging themselves across the sky before looming over your house in such a manner that you would think the sky was attempting to mug you like it had the ability.

Today, there was no mugging attempt. The sky was clear once again, a bright mixture of whites and blues, the tiniest sprinkle of clouds skimming across. The sun was bright and shining up in the sky, however, it wasn’t warm out. Not like yesterday. The sun’s presence seemed to be in vain, for today, it was cool enough to wear a sweater and not have people ask you if you’re okay or needed help. However, it was only eleven in the morning, so by the end of the night, the pavement and dirt in the town will still be damp from a surprise late afternoon shower.

Keith found himself outside on the porch again, a lit cigarette pinched between his pointer and middle fingers on his left hand. His mind was reeling at the thoughts of yesterday and he struggled to keep still as pictures and words flickered in and out of his brain. He ended up outside, the nicotine traveling through his system. He was hunched over and resting his elbows on the railing of the porch. Keith’s eyes skimmed over his lifeless backyard, lingering on the leafless trees and brown crunchy flowers. The yellowed and dead grass is overgrown, yet laid flat on the ground because of lacking the ability to withstand any kind of weather.

\---

Yesterday evening when Keith had gotten back to the house, he noticed Shiro’s bedding and Acxa’s clothes on the floor beside the staircase. He’d forgotten about the laundry he had started. Keith gave a sigh of frustration before using his right foot to anchor down the heel of his left shoe and pull out his left foot, repeating that process with his right shoe and left foot, leaning against the wall of the entryway for support. Keith had been wearing mismatched socks. At a glance, you wouldn’t be able to tell, since they were both black socks, but the brands were different so the logo at the toes was different.

When it cooled down outside and the sky was a gentle purple, and the stars started to make their shy and sparkly appearance, Keith got back to the laundry. It took a couple of hours to complete. By the time he had finished, the moon was out and the stars were shining confidently in the sky. He started to fold his sister’s clothes before remembering that Acxa did nothing with her clothes, so he stopped and shoved them in their respective drawers to let them become crumpled and wrinkled.

Keith didn’t bother putting Takashi’s bedding together. He just threw the sheets and comforter on top of Takashi’s mattress and closed the door. The bedding was still there, undone and crumpled.

\---

Keith wasn’t able to sleep last night. He couldn’t stomach the thought of seeing Lance- he couldn’t stomach the thought of seeing a stranger that made anxiety and irritation run through his veins and fester in his throat. Lance isn’t a bad person, Keith can tell, he’s just… He’s naive in the ways it matters. He’s self-centered and refuses to listen to those outside of his family business, and is way too clean and nitpicky. It’s clear to see that he thinks dirt is something straight out of a new-age horror film, and that anyone who has ever touched it, should be set on fire to cleanse their body of the atrocity.

Okay, maybe that was going a little far. Lance probably just hates dirt because it makes his skin dry or something. That sometimes happens to Keith, touching a pile of dirt and suddenly all of the moisture in your hand is gone and it doesn’t feel right.

Keith sits up and turns his body to allow his feet to fall from the bed and lightly brush against the cold hardwood flooring. His bedroom was the only one in the house with hardwood flooring. Nobody knows why. Acxa’s room, Takashi’s room, and his mother’s room, all have soft off-white carpeting that’s so plush that it might actually be shag carpeting.

Keith didn’t know what time it was, he gave up on checking it sometime past four in the morning, but with how sickly blue the sky looks he would guess it was around six-o’-clock. The sky still had some gray to it, leaving the air cold and clear. Keith always enjoyed this time of day. He likes listening to the birds chirping and the frogs in his neighbor’s broken hot tub croaking. The way the fresh morning dew reflected any rays of sunlight to show off its refreshingly brilliant appearance. The heavy coolness in the air that hung on his shoulders like a chilled and plush blanket. All of it was nice.

Keith ran a hand through his hair, or at least he tried to. His hair was tangled seven ways to Sunday from trying to get some sleep. He had a nasty habit of tossing and turning in his sleep. He stood up from his mattress and stumbled across his room in a rather ungraceful fashion. His body felt heavy with exhaustion and lack of sleep. His hand fumbled for the light switch that was somewhere next to his door frame, flicking it on once he found it. Keith turns and looks at his room. He looks at his large piles of laundry, clean and dirty constantly finding themselves mixing together. He looks at his bookshelf, the books not organized in any way besides books from the same series being placed together. His closet, which is right next to his bedroom door, though a couple of feet away, is something that is never to be opened. It’s full of bags of old clothing and schoolwork from high school and middle school that Keith can never seem to throw away.

Keith’s room is filthy, and that’s that. He’s tried to change; he’s tried to throw the piles and piles and piles of old homework and answer sheets and projects away. He’s tried to purge his room of everything that makes him angry at himself, which makes him hate himself, but it doesn’t work. It all just ends up in the same place it was before, but adjusted to the right or left by a couple of centimeters or inches.

Keith sighs to himself before rummaging through his clothes for a pair of pants and a t-shirt. Keith’s standards when going through his laundry in search of clothing is that what he’s looking for can’t have stains nor can it smell like old laundry. Like, y’know that musty sort of wet smell, even though the clothes are dry and they ran through the dryer, but because you haven’t worn that shirt or those pants in quite a long time, a smell like wet laundry develops?

Is that just a Keith problem?

Anyways.

\---

Keith eventually found a shirt and a pair of pants to wear that didn’t scream “Hey, World! I can’t properly take care of myself, check out this shirt I found with a giant weird stain on it!”. He found a red t-shirt to wear and a pair of blue denim pants that didn’t look like they used to belong to a homeless man. They didn’t even have holes in the knees. Keith felt like he had stumbled upon a long lost treasure from a time unknown to man.

Five bucks these get ruined by the end of the day, Keith bet himself.

Keith accepted the bet, knowing he would lose. Or would he win?

It doesn’t matter.

Keith headed downstairs and towards the backdoor that led to his backyard. He wasn’t going outside for a cigarette, it was just to enjoy the morning weather. To hear the birds and frogs. To breathe in the cool and refreshing air. To see how the morning dew desperately clings to the dead flowers and grass.

It was the only thing Keith liked about his backyard.

Stepping outside barefoot, the early morning chill was quick to grab onto Keith by any visible skin. His arms, wrists, hands, ears, the nape of his neck, his feet- all of it was suddenly bitten by the cold and Keith refused to complain. It felt good. The hairs on his arms were raised by the goosebumps kissing his skin, and his fingers quickly found themselves going pink. The wooden planks of the porch’s flooring held a coldness that most would consider footwear-worthy.

Odd were the mornings in early spring, and the afternoon to quickly follow the evening. How the temperature loves to fluctuate drastically from unbearably cold in the morning, to unbearably hot in the afternoon, to just right but too dark in the evening. Keith has always held an affinity for spring. He loved the unpredictability it brought to his otherwise predictable life. His predictable, repetitive, ever-looping, life.

Keith leans his body forward against the railing and took a few deep breaths. In, and out. In, and out. In, and out. His body was sore and his eyes stung with a kind of dryness you could only achieve through a night of tossing and turning. He was physically exhausted and uncomfortable. He didn’t like the way his knotted and unbrushed hair swept along the nape of his neck. He didn’t like how his teeth felt- dirty and textured. His morning breath was well and alive. Keith knows that these issues had solutions, he really does; it’s the lack of motivation coursing through his veins and stopping at his brain that’s doing him in.

Keith continues to stand there, his feet becoming colder and colder as he goes back and forth, debating whether or not he should go inside and take care of the problems causing him discomfort, or if he’s going to let himself continue to suffer like this.

Is it really suffering, though? asks Keith’s Brain

Yes! insists Keith’s Brain Everything feels bad!!

Unfortunate.

Incredibly.

And yet he stands there. His body shows no signs of cooperating and taking him inside, but his right foot is tapping against the porch. Keith couldn’t think of anything that would get his body moving. He considered bribery, but qualifies as bribery to a body that won’t listen to you and just does whatever it wants? Nothing. Whatever his body considered suddenly Necessary, apparently.

One time, Keith was making himself dinner but he got bored so he stopped making dinner and ended up cleaning the laundry room from top to bottom. He ended up forgetting to eat that evening, his stomach empty but his laundry room spotless. When Keith realized how late it had gotten, somewhere around eleven at night, he considered it too late to eat so he went to bed without dinner. Not that he actually minded at the time.

As Keith stands on the cold concrete, his feet so cold they burn, he looks out towards his dead backyard. He remembers the hours Acxa would spend out here during the spring and summer months. Eleven-year-old Acxa originally out there just to water the grass to prevent it from dying. Twelve-year-old Acxa getting an idea to plant flowers; Keith remembers her working odd jobs around the town, such as babysitting, weed-pulling, tutoring the third and fourth graders, nickel and diming her way towards being able to afford flower seeds, a proper watering can instead of using the hose, a new trowel, and a bus ride to and from the next city over. It had taken her months to save up all of that money and she threw it all away towards the backyard.

Not really. Keith shouldn’t think like that. Acxa loved the backyard. The only time she would smile was when she was out here. Keith remembers sitting on the concrete of the patio, watching his sister put time and effort and love into the backyard. He remembers the genuine smiles she would give the delicate seedlings that managed to find their ways out of the dirt and into the real world. The sweet and gentle praise she would give them for being so strong. The way she would touch them as if they were the most precious things in the world to her. As if they meant everything to her. And they did. The entire backyard was Acxa’s favorite place to be.

\---

Keith’s favorite place to be used to be on the patio, until one evening Acxa found herself in a particularly sour and bitter mood. Keith was sitting on the patio on a warm summer day, watching Acxa digging new holes for some seeds she had just purchased. He doesn’t even remember saying anything to her, but he must have because the next thing he knew, Acxa was yelling at him. She was demanding he shut up and go inside otherwise she would throw something at him.

Keith had always been the more stubborn twin out of the two of them. He stayed put but stopped speaking. That hadn’t been enough for Acxa, apparently, because the next thing Keith knew, he was leaning forward, his hand on his head as blood dripped onto the concrete. Next to his hand on the patio had been a trowel. One of the sides had blood on it. Keith remembers looking up at his sister, who was now standing over him and feeling scared. She had an empty look in her eyes, no sign of remorse in her pitch-black eyes. He heard her call for their mother, saying something about Keith hitting his head and bleeding. Acxa nudged the trowel away from Keith with her foot, shifting it so that it was parallel to her right foot, kicking it across the yard.

Keith’s mother had come outside to see what was going on. When she saw Keith leaning forward and bleeding, she pulled him up into a standing position. She wasn’t rough, but she wasn’t exactly gentle either. As she looked at Keith’s injury, she decided that he would need stitches.

“Acxa,” she had said, her voice void of panic or worry. “Go get a hand towel from the bathroom, I don’t want him to bleed on the carpet.”

Acxa had done as she was told. Keith’s mother had asked him what he had hit his head on, but all Keith did was shake his head. He didn’t want Acxa to get in trouble for hurting him.

Keith’s mother leaned towards Keith’s ear. “She’s not going to be in trouble, I just need to know what happened, okay?” she whispered. Keith must have been seriously hurt to think he heard the concern in his mother’s voice. “Did she throw something at you? What happened?”

“‘S’a trowel…” Keith muttered. “I didn’t go inside.”

And that’s all he had said on the matter. His mother nodded.

“Okay,” she said.

Acxa then came out holding a dark blue rag. “This was all I could find that was clean and not white.”

“Thank you, Acxa,” their mother said. She then gently pressed it onto the cut on Keith’s forehead. It seemed to be close to his hairline. “Hold that there and follow me inside.” She turned her attention back to Acxa as she stood up. “Go back to what you were doing, I’m going to take your brother to the emergency room.”

Acxa gave a sarcastic salute and went back to tending to her flowers. Keith and his mother then went inside and headed to the front door. His mother grabbed his shoes and slipped them onto his bare feet. She slipped on a pair of sandals, opened the front door, and led him out to the car, closing the front door behind her. She helped him into the car, buckling him in and everything. Keith remembers thinking about how much attention his mother was giving him- how it had been the most attention she’d shown him since his father died. Since her husband died.

Keith doesn’t really remember the drive to the emergency room. Not that there would be anything exciting about the dramatic and green expanse of the fields full of produce near-ripe for harvesting and selling. He remembers his mother trying to talk to him. Sort of. Her words had sounded far away and sort of echoey, like she was talking down a well or into a deep cave. Fourteen-year-old Keith wasn’t sure if it was from the blood loss or if it was because he was dying from his injury.

Keith didn’t die, thankfully. He made it out of the emergency room alive and well, his forehead stitched up via five stitches and white gauze. The doctor told him and his mother that Keith definitely had a concussion and he was to be treated with care. Keith was barely listening, he was trying his best not to throw up from the bright fluorescent lights of the emergency room, his stomach doing somersaults as his brain did backflips and frontflips. He was only able to get out the word “bucket” before tossing his lunch onto the floor.

It wasn’t pretty.

\---

Keith sighs at the memory and stands up and away from the patio’s banister. Out of the corner of his eye, he can see the dark stains from seven years ago. If you looked at it from a certain angle it kind of looked like a rabbit. Keith wasn’t at the right angle to see it as a rabbit. It just looked like a stain on the concrete as well as Keith’s memories. Acxa never apologized for what she did, but that didn’t surprise Keith one bit. She was always a silent and spiteful type. Keith still can’t remember what he said to make her so angry. Maybe he breathed wrong.

Bringing his fingers up to his forehead, Keith felt around for the scar that was left behind. As he got older it continued to get smaller, so it’s been getting harder and harder to find it, but Keith still managed to do it. And there it was: roughly an inch long, possibly shorter, and slightly raised. It hid by laying right at his hairline, mingling well with his hair. He’s not sure if anyone besides his family is aware of its existence. Nobody really takes their time to look at Keith. Like, really look. Not that he really minds. Sometimes it’s nice to blend in.

Keith finds it hard to tear his gaze away from the “rabbit” on the patio. It’s almost like his brain wants him to think about everything bad that’s happened to him for the whole week because the same thing happened yesterday. He couldn’t seem to stop thinking about everyone leaving him alone and abandoning him. It was awful. It’s still awful. Keith’s feet are still cold. It's gotten to the point where he can barely feel them, yet he just can’t seem to look away.

Rabbit.

Rabbit.

It’s a rabbit.

It’s a stain, but it’s a rabbit.

\---

Keith doesn’t remember coming inside from the morning’s cold air, but he eventually found himself sitting on the living room couch, his toes still slightly cold to the touch. It was about seven-thirty. There was still about four and a half hours before he and Lance were supposed to meet up. Keith had no idea how he was supposed to convince a complete stranger that his hometown was deserving of a community center. There was hardly a proper community to even give a center to. After the death of his father and the destruction of the community center, everything just… started to fall apart. Close-knit friends and colleagues eventually and voluntarily fell out of touch with one another. And now nobody knows anything about anyone.


End file.
